Flat-Living.co.uk ARMA Has the Coalition abandoned leaseholders?
The chairman of the Association of Residential Managing Agents (ARMA) and Partner at Curry & Partners in Birmingham, Brett Williams explains.
Flat-Living.co.uk ARMA
I Brett Williams agents. However, Grant Shapps, the minister, has missed one vital point.
The plans to regulate letting agents were to include managers of leasehold properties, but local authorities have very few powers to deal with rogue leasehold landlords and their managing agents. After calling for regulation of the leasehold sector for over 10 years we are right back to square one! But, we thought, there are still the provisions in the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002 to come on the holding and accounting for lessees’ service charge monies. At least lessees’ money was to be held in a separate designated bank account and lessees would have the right to automatically receive a full set of annual service charge accounts along with an accountant’s report.
INTENSIVE WORK And guess what? At the end of June the Communities and Local
Government department informed ARMA that, after eight years since the Act was passed and three years of intensive work to produce the regulations, matters were not going to be progressed. The law was in place, the regulations near to completion and simple parliamentary processes left
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t was with dismay but not too much surprise that we heard in June that the Gov- ernment has abandoned plans to regulate the pri-
vate rented sector. The Housing Minister’s thinking being that local authorities already have adequate powers to deal with rogue landlords and their letting
to complete – we were so near to giving lessees some really worthwhile protection and then ‘for the want of a nail’, nothing! Grant Shapps, at the time of writing, has still to make a public statement on this, but we are given to understand his reason is to reduce the regulatory burden! On whom? The very rogues who do not handle lessee money properly! Good leasehold landlords and managing agents are fully accounting for lessee money already so where is the burden on them? The end result is we are back to self-regulation and I can assure readers
ARMA will play its part in filling the dreadful void in lessee protection this Coalition has created. Not least we will be looking to produce detailed guidance on good accounting practice to supplement the existing Codes. And, to at least give lessees a ‘fighting chance’, we are calling for all managers of leasehold property to be subject to independent redress through an Ombudsman Scheme as is already the case for members of ARMA and our fellow trade and professional bodies.
Grant Shapps
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